What Do California And Detroit Have In Common?

Once the wealthiest city in America, known as the "arsenal of democracy," Detroit was the fourth largest city in the U.S. in the 1960s with a population of two million. Now a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the American economy, Detroit has become nothing more than a devastated landscape of urban decay with a current population of 713,000.

Visiting Detroit is the closest Americans can come to viewing what appears to be a war torn city without leaving the U.S. This former powerhouse is a barren stretch of land, devastated by looters and and full of run-down, vacant houses. Rows upon rows of dilapidated structures line the streets; empty apartment buildings and factories consume the landscape. Almost a third of Detroit has been abandoned.

Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their "smart growth" plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. "What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s," Mr. Kotkin declares.

"The new regime"--his name for progressive apparatchiks who run California's government--"wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles."

Housing is merely one front of what he calls the "progressive war on the middle class." Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out manufacturing jobs without making even a dent in global carbon emissions. Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that a third of the state's energy come from renewable sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California's electricity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.

Obama regularly asserts that green jobs will play a crucial role in the future of the American economy, but California, a trend-setter in the field, has yet to reap such benefits. Green jobs, broadly defined, make up only about 2 percent of jobs in the state--about the same proportion as in Texas. In Silicon Valley, the number of green jobs actually declined between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, California's unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is the nation's third highest, behind only Nevada and Rhode Island.

When Governor Jerry Brown predicted a half-million green jobs by the end of the decade, even The New York Times deemed it "a pipe dream."

Obama's push to nationalize many of California's economy-stifling green policies has been slowed down, first by the Republican resurgence in 2010 and then by his reelection considerations. But California's politicians, living in what's become essentially a one-party state, have doubled down on green orthodoxy. As the president at least tries to cover his flank by claiming to support an "all-in" energy policy, California has simply refused to exploit much of its massive oil and gas resources.

California personal-income-tax collections in April are falling short of Governor Jerry Brown's projection by more than $2 billion, data from Controller John Chiang show. The state is already facing a $9.2 billion deficit through June 2013.

With two days to be counted, the state has taken in $6.74 billion since April 1, according to a daily tally on Chiang's website. Brown's projection for the month was $9.13 billion.